How to Get Your Leadership Team Aligned

By Malcolm Gurley, President

Gurley Leadership Solutions Inc.

Your leadership team leaves the quarterly meeting nodding in agreement. Two weeks later, sales is chasing volume, operations is protecting margin, and each department is quietly running in its own direction. The strategy was fine. What broke was everything that happened after the meeting ended.

I have watched this play out in organizations across Durham Region and the Greater Toronto Area for 35 years. Leadership team alignment is not a communication problem or a personality problem. It is a structural problem, and structural problems have structural fixes.

Why Is My Leadership Team Not Aligned?

The most common reason leadership teams fall out of alignment is that alignment is treated as an event rather than a practice. Leaders meet once a quarter, agree on a direction, and then return to their own departments where their own pressures, their own metrics, and their own people pull them back into their own priorities. Nobody is acting in bad faith. The structure simply does not hold.

The second reason is that most leadership teams have too many priorities. When everything is important, leaders default to whatever is most urgent in their own area, and the organization fragments. A leadership team with fifteen priorities has no priorities.

The third reason is that decision ownership is undefined. When it is unclear who decides what, leaders either escalate everything to the top or make unilateral calls that contradict each other. Both outcomes look like misalignment, but the root cause is structural ambiguity.

What Does an Aligned Leadership Team Actually Look Like?

Alignment is often confused with agreement. They are not the same thing. An aligned leadership team can disagree openly and often. What makes them aligned is that once a decision is made, every leader carries it forward consistently, and their teams receive the same message from every direction.

Based on my work with organizations across Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa, Clarington, Pickering, and the broader GTA, aligned leadership teams share these traits:

• Every leader can name the same three to five organizational priorities without checking their notes
• Decision ownership is explicit, so leaders know what they decide alone and what they decide together
• Disagreement happens in the room, not in the hallway afterward
• Each leader's departmental goals visibly connect to the shared organizational objectives
• Leaders hold each other accountable, not just their own direct reports
• The cadence of review is frequent enough that drift is caught in weeks, not quarters

Every one of these is a structural habit that can be built. None of them happen through goodwill alone. Learn more about Malcolm Gurley's approach to building these habits inside organizations across Durham Region.

Why Does Leadership Team Alignment Matter to the Bottom Line?

The financial case for alignment is well documented. McKinsey research, drawing on 354 top-team members across 28 major companies globally, found that companies whose top executive team is aligned and working effectively together are almost twice as likely to achieve above-median financial performance. That is not a soft benefit. That is a measurable competitive gap.

The cost of misalignment compounds as it moves down the organization. When leaders send conflicting signals, their teams absorb the contradiction and pass it further down. Conflicting instructions, inconsistent standards, and fragmented culture do not stay at the leadership level. They cascade through every layer beneath.

Gallup research shows that 70 percent of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager, which means a misaligned leadership team does not just slow strategy. It systematically degrades engagement across the whole organization, one team at a time.

What Do the Major Training Organizations Say About Alignment?

How Do I Get My Leadership Team Aligned? Seven Steps

Here is the sequence I use with leadership teams across manufacturing, healthcare, not-for-profit, engineering, and operations sectors throughout Durham Region and the Greater Toronto Area.

1. Define who is actually on the leadership team. Most organizations have never explicitly answered this. Clarify who is in the room, what the team's mandate is, and which decisions belong to this group collectively.
2. Cut your priorities down to three to five. Force each leader to name what success looks like in their area, then collectively distill the list into the handful that genuinely move the organization forward. If it does not fit on one page, it is not a priority list.
3. Write the goals down and make them specific. Written goals with a starting line, a finish line, and a deadline. Verbal agreement is not alignment. If leaders cannot recite the priorities from memory, the goals are not clear enough.
4. Assign explicit decision ownership. For every priority, name who decides, who must be consulted, and who is informed. Ambiguity here is the single largest source of leadership friction.
5. Connect every leader's departmental goals to the shared objectives. Each leader should be able to explain in one sentence how their area's work advances a specific organizational priority.
6. Establish a cadence of accountability. A short, regular session where leaders report progress and commit to next actions. Weekly or biweekly, not quarterly. Drift is caught early or it is not caught at all.
7. Build the habit through repetition, not a single offsite. Alignment is a practice, not an event. It is developed through structured sessions over months, applied to real decisions, with the behaviour tracked and measured.

How Do I Knock Down Silos in My Organization?

Silos are a symptom of leadership misalignment, not a separate problem. They form when leaders are measured and rewarded on their own departmental outcomes while the organization's shared objectives sit somewhere in the background. Every leader is behaving rationally within the incentives they have been given. The incentives are the problem.

The fix starts at the leadership level. When leaders share a small set of written objectives that require cross-functional cooperation to achieve, and when they are accountable to each other rather than only upward, silos begin to dissolve on their own. The departments follow the leaders. Visit the FAQ page for common questions about how the program works and what organizations typically see.

How Long Does It Take to Align a Leadership Team?

Alignment begins showing within the first few working sessions, because the exercise of forcing a leadership team to name and rank their real priorities surfaces disagreements that were previously invisible. That is uncomfortable and it is also the point. Most organizations discover in the first session that their leaders were operating on materially different assumptions about what mattered most.

Lasting alignment takes months, not days, because it depends on new habits replacing old ones under real pressure. This is why a single offsite rarely holds. Through a proven program from Leadership Management International, customized to your organization, I work directly with your leadership team over a structured series of spaced working sessions applied to your actual goals and decisions. Behavioural change is tracked. Results are measured. Malcolm Gurley works with organizations throughout the Greater Toronto Area and Durham Region, including Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa, Clarington, Pickering, Barrie, and Mississauga.

Frequently Asked Questions About Leadership Team Alignment

How do I get my leadership team aligned?

Get your leadership team aligned by building shared written goals and shared accountability. Cut your priorities to three to five, write them down specifically, assign explicit decision ownership, connect each leader's departmental goals to the shared objectives, and establish a regular cadence of accountability. Alignment is a practice built over months of structured sessions, not a single offsite. A proven program from Leadership Management International, customized to your organization, develops exactly these habits with measurable results.

How do I knock down silos in my organization?

Silos form when leaders are measured on their own departmental outcomes while shared organizational objectives sit in the background. The fix starts at the leadership level. When leaders share a small set of written objectives that require cross-functional cooperation, and when they are accountable to each other rather than only upward, silos dissolve over time. The departments follow the leaders.

How do I align my team together?

Team alignment starts with clarity. Every person should be able to name the organization's top priorities and explain in one sentence how their own work advances one of them. That clarity comes from the leadership team first. If your leaders are not aligned on the same three to five objectives, no amount of communication further down will produce alignment. Leadership training and skills development is the most direct way to build it.

How do I move my company to the next level?

Most organizations that plateau do not have a strategy problem. They have an execution problem rooted in leadership misalignment. McKinsey research found that companies whose top executive team is aligned and working effectively together are almost twice as likely to achieve above-median financial performance. Getting your leadership team working from the same written objectives with shared accountability is usually the highest-return move available.

Do you work with leadership teams in Durham Region?

Yes. Gurley Leadership Solutions is based in Ajax, Ontario and works directly with leadership teams across Durham Region and the Greater Toronto Area, including Whitby, Oshawa, Clarington, Pickering, Barrie, and Mississauga, across manufacturing, healthcare, not-for-profit, engineering, and operations sectors. Every program is delivered in person and customized to the specific goals of your organization.

About the Author: Malcolm Gurley

Malcolm Gurley is President of Gurley Leadership Solutions Inc., based in Ajax, Ontario. With more than 35 years of senior executive experience at Fortune 100 and manufacturing organizations including Honeywell, Johnson Controls, and Armstrong Fluid Technology, he helps organizations across the Greater Toronto Area and Durham Region align their leadership teams and raise leadership effectiveness at every level. He is LMI Canada licensed and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Every program is a proven Leadership Management International program, customized to the organization, with a return on investment of typically 10:1 or better. Learn more about Malcolm Gurley and why organizations choose Gurley Leadership Solutions.